


Studying

by Ambrosia29



Category: The Walking Dead (TV)
Genre: Alexandria Safe-Zone, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Anatomy, F/M, Fluff, Massage, Skeletal Structures, Suggestive Themes, Unresolved Romantic Tension, Unresolved Sexual Tension, muscular structures
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-03-08
Updated: 2016-03-15
Packaged: 2018-05-25 14:27:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,519
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6198607
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ambrosia29/pseuds/Ambrosia29
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Beth wakes up to Daryl's exploring fingers and some good news.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Skull and Spine

**Author's Note:**

> I'm studying anatomy as a huge part of my vocational studies (massage therapy) and I've figured out that I can write fic and do that. And strangely, it actually helps! So here you go. There is actual plot with this, believe it or not. Hope you all enjoy it.

 

Gentle fingers, pads warm and callused brushed along her tailbone, sending gooseflesh up her back and a subtle flutter low in her belly. She smiled, relaxing further into the pillow.

  
The fingers pressed gently, circling over the knobs of vertebrae as they trailed slowly down the slope of her tailbone to her lower back.

  
A voice floated through the air and to her ears, a low rumbling murmur, “Sacrum…lumbar vertebrae, five…four, three…two. First lumbar,” and continued until the fingers paused, tips gently resting lightly at the base of her ribs.  
She waited, listening to breath and the quiet rustle of paper, felt the mattress bounce as he shifted. She wondered to herself if he knew she was awake. He probably did. Observant as he is, his focus and attention to detail may have obscured this fact, if he was as engrossed as she suspected.

  
“Twelfth thoracic, eleventh,” his fingers continued almost absently, first stroking feather-light up the groove of her spine and pressing gently, small circles to find the bumps made by her…what were they called? She shifted her head to the other side and pressed her cheek to the pillow, savoring the touch, the feel of soft linen against her face. She’d ask him later.   
“Five, four…three” and continued on to, “First thoracic.” He paused again, stroked her between her shoulder blades, hand skimming down her back to her tailbone. A small sigh, not her own. She smiled, face hidden.

  
“Cervical,” her mind jumped to the word cervix and she hoped to god she wasn’t blushing, “vertebrae.” His hands wandered up her back, palm and fingers stroking, alternately firm and soft, over her hip, up her side an over a shoulder blade to the knob at the base of her neck. “Seventh cervical…sixth,”

  
She sighed, arched her neck into his palm. He purred, a warm rumble in his chest that curled her toes against the sheets and spanned her nape with his palm, kneaded her neck for a moment.

  
His fingers resumed their pinpoint ministrations along her flesh and she marveled at the way she flushed, at how she couldn’t stop a smile from pulling at her lips, the gentle glow of pleasure, of warmth singing softly down her neck and up her throat. She tried to keep her breath even as she felt herself slowly tighten and swell between her thighs.

  
“Third cervical…axis…atlas.” His fingers sank into her hair and stroked her scalp. Firm fingers rubbed small circles and tingles of further pleasure emanated from her head to her neck and shoulders. Her eyes, half open, fell closed again and she couldn’t help a small moan. How does this feel so good?

  
He chuckled, “Mornin.’” She tried to raise her head and he held it down gently, stroking a thumb behind her ear and making her shiver before resuming his path through her curls. A second hand joined the first and spanned over each side of her head. He paused every now and then, naming the parts of her skull. In her head it sounded macabre, but it really was nothing of the kind. It just was. “Parietal, temporal,” worked his way from the sides to the back of her skull, “lambdoid suture,” ran thumbs over the knob at the back, “occiput, external occipital protuberance –

  
“What a mouthful,” she felt the bed shift, his warmth moving closer and a tickling pressure of lips beneath and over the anatomy in question. His lips lingered.

  
“Yes,” he said softly, “It is.” He traced fingers over her temples, rubbing circles into the soft tissue and trailed them back over her ears, pressure steady and melting her into the mattress. He moved back to her temples, murmuring, “Sphenoid, zygomatic” up to “frontal lobe” and down the sides. He reached the knob behind her ears and his touch grew even slower, fingers exploring the anatomy around her ears as he massaged. “Zygomatic arch, temporomandibular joint,” he dipped down to the sides of her jaw and pressed gently, sliding along the muscles there. She sighed deeply and allowed herself to go limp beneath him. “Coronoid process, condyle of the mandible.” He moved back behind her ears, stroking to either side of them, nearly rolling her eyes back, though he couldn’t see them hidden in her arms.

  
Pressure lightening steadily until it is feather-light he traces invisible lines toward the top of her skull. “Superior nuchal line, lambdoid suture,” he intones. His touch stops before the apex, his voice the barest whisper, “Sagittal suture.”  
The very air was quiet following that breath. Something like tension but not bad…more like expectation. She felt quiet beneath him, beneath his hands, though outwardly nothing had changed. She waited, the air tense around her.

  
Those feathers ghosted into her scalp, brushing into the blonde tresses. Searched. Explored. Barely there. She held her breath. They withdrew. A light popping sound nearly echoed in the silence. More probing. Another series of light touches. Single points of contact. One, two, three, four over the top of her head, marking four points of diameter.

  
“H-how is it?” she whispered past the flesh of her arms.

  
“Hang on.” More rustling, the warped metallic sound of measuring tape extending and the soft crack of paper. She held still. Listened to more moving paper as he transferred the measurements to something she could see.

  
Silence.

  
After a heartbeat she turned, looking over her shoulder at him. He held up a piece of paper, four dots arranged in a diamond pattern, a second piece of paper beneath it. At her angle she couldn’t see anything more, his face obscured.  
“Well?” She hated how anxiety threaded her voice. The paper moved aside and his sharp blue eyes were warm as they met hers. His face was carefully blank but his eyes…she already knew. Her heart leapt to her throat.

  
She took the papers from him and leaned back, holding them up to the window. Backlit, she saw it clearly. The dots on the page superimposed showed one set. But there was some overlap. The dots on this new page were a little closer together.  
She grinned, setting them aside to look at him. His smile, so rare, less so these days, matched hers. She reached for him as he leaned down and wrapped each other in an embrace. She trembled with excitement and inhaled his comforting scent.  
“It’s growing back.” The wonder and disbelief in her voice was palpable. He squeezed her a little and she felt him nod.

  
“Seems that way,” he mumbled. Always so cautious. Every step forward she took, he was there to catch her when she found herself in a back-slide. If it was frustrating to her, she couldn’t imagine how he felt, watching her. “We should show Deanna. Make sure.”

  
This time she nodded.

  
A smile playing with her lips, she ran a hand through his hair, pushing it out of his eyes.

  
This was a great way to wake up.


	2. Muscles of the Leg and Foot pt1

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Beth is quizzing Daryl on anatomy. She's letting him touch her for reference and practice. Things get tense.

_Some time earlier..._

 

“Where’s the insertion point?” Her voice seemed to float through the air on a light breeze. But that was the cracked window.

His hands gently held her ankle suspended in the air as he took in a deep breath and closed his eyes, focusing. In his mind’s eye he could still see her there, lying on her stomach in her shorts and tank top, facing the headboard while he sat at the foot of her bed in jeans and a flannel with the sleeves ripped off. Her hair was in its customary tail, three small braids dangling over her shoulder onto the book in front of her.

She was looking down at the textbook Denise had recommended he find. It had been right where it was expected: a massage therapist’s office adjacent to a small Asian grocer they’d hit on their last run. No trouble at all.

The foot in his hand waved from his fingers and through the air, back to prod at his shoulder before he caught it again.

“Gotta focus, Daryl.”

He snorted and fingered her ankle – _calcaneus_ , _malleolus_ and _talus_ – he reminded himself. _Medial is the interior, closer to the center, lateral is on the outside of the limbs_. Her ankle jiggled with the rest of her foot and he grasped it more firmly, opening his eyes to glower at her. There was no fire in it though. Or, there was…

But it wasn’t that kind of fire.

She raised an eyebrow and regarded him coolly, head propped on her hand as she shifted onto her side to look back at him. “Well?”

“M’getting to it,” he muttered. She shifted back onto her stomach slowly and looked back down at the book, letting him examine her leg as he held her calf in the air by the ankle.

“The hamstring –

“The _what_?”

“ _Calcaneal tendon_ ,” he corrected himself, “is the insertion point of the _Gastrocnemius_.”

“Not quite.” He sighed, a pretense at exacerbation in the face of her gentle voice. He was getting it, he knew he was. It was just taking him longer than he’d wanted.

“The _gastrocnemius_ inserts into the _calcaneus_ via the _calcaneal tendon_.” And Denise would not forgive him the oversight if he forgot it.

“Actions?”

“Flexes the knee and plantar-flexes the ankle.” He took in her nod out of the corner of his eye, focusing on the muscle in question beneath the fingers of his other hand, following the gastrocnemius from the back of her ankle at the calcaneus, up the tendon and over the – he internally rolled his eyes at Denise’s voice in his head – _heads of the gastrocnemius, insertion at –_

 _“_ So where do they originate?” He smiled gently and his fingers continued their path to the back of her knee. She squirmed and he held her ankle tighter, pulling her leg up and back slightly, straightening the limb. He gently dug his fingers over the tendons just above her knee, pressing to feel the knobbed heads of the medial and lateral sides of the femur.

“Right here. The _Gastrocnemius_ originates at the _condyles_ of the _femur_.”

She nodded and flashed him a smile over her shoulder. “What about the other muscles down there?”

“Well, they all look pretty good,” he said in a low tone, thumb stroking her ankle – _calcaneus._ She giggled and he couldn’t see her face where she lowered it into the book but he could swear she was blushing. “You’re wantin’ the _Soleus_ though. Originates from both the _proximal surface_ of the _tibia_ and the _posterior head_ of the _fibula_.” He paused. Just so she would ask and he could hear her voice again.

“And…the origin?”

_Girl, you don’t even know._

“I mean,” she continued hastily, “the insertion. Where is the insertion point?”

He waited a beat, cleared his throat. When he spoke, it was lower than he’d intended and thick with the words he still couldn’t bring himself to say. “Also the _calcaneal tendon_.”

“Anything else?”

_Yes._

“The _soleus_ is deep to the _gastrocnemius_. Its _medial_ and _lateral fibers_ ,” in a firm but gliding and lite touch over the sides of her calf, framed by the fingers and thumb of his strong hand, he stroked the sides of the muscle in question slowly, “extend to the sides past the _gastrocnemius_.”

She took in a slow deep breath and he held his own. Her voice, when she used it, was steady. “And its actions?”

“Plantar-flexes the ankle.”

The blonde nods again. “See, you’re getting it. I don’t know how, I’d find it all a bit overwhelming.” She looks back at him and he’s pinned there by her eyes. He realizes she’s expecting an answer.

He swallows. “M’motivated,” he says quietly, tone and words hanging in the air between them. Everything goes still as they look at each other. Tense, like time expects something momentous.

In the quiet of the room, the laughter of children playing in the afternoon sun drifts through the cracked window, breaking the spell. Beth glances back down at the book, brushes her middle finger over the scar there on its way to tuck a stray hair behind her ear.

“So you’ve got those down, what about the others? The…” she waited for him to name another muscle.

Safe and unseen behind her, he took a moment to admire her before re-focusing.

“The… _plantaris_?” He adjusted his hand where it rested casually on her calf, flexing it to rid himself of the tingle in his fingers and couldn’t believe that he was thinking like this and didn’t give a shit. It felt too good. Even if she...

“Okay?” she asked, waiting for him to elaborate.

“Its another that inserts at the _calcaneal tendon_ , originates,” his fingers gently probe the back of her knee, lifting her ankle to flex the joint, “at the _lateral supracondylar line_ of the _femur_. Has weaker plantar-flexion of the ankle and flexes the knee, also weak.” He wondered why they even had the muscle in the first place.

“Okay, wow, you’ve really got that one.”

“Guess so.”

“Alright, now for the pop – _pop?_ –

He leaned and glanced over her shoulder. “ _Popliteus_.”

She waved her right hand over her left shoulder and chided him, “No peeking. This ‘s a serious study-session.” He grinned safely behind her view. “The popliteus is sometimes called the…?”

“Key which unlocks the knee. Helps unlock the joint, flexes the knee.”

“And its origin and insertion?”

“The _femur_.” She looked back at him with raised eyebrows. “The _lateral condyle_ of the _femur_.” She gave him another of those small smiles and tilted her head to one side a little. He’d have felt awkward with that movement but with her long neck it looked natural and easy.

“Inserts,” the words drawn from him, “at the _proximal_ , _posterior_ of the _tibia_.” He circles the back of her knee with his thumb and she shivers, something like a laugh escaping on her breath. His heart skips and he takes a deep breath, lets it out silently. _Focus, Daryl…_

“Think we need a break.” He blinks at her as she draws her limb from his grasp, pulling her legs beneath her as she sits up and stretches. “We’ve been at this for a bit, I need to stretch or something.” He nods mutely, catches himself staring as she raises her hands high and twists her torso around. She laughs softly and bites at her lip as he starts, forces himself to meet her eyes. “You look like you could use one, too.”

“Yeah,” he stands and turns his back to her as he does his own stretching, “Guess I could.”

“I’m gonna go…get some apples from the kitchen, or something, if that’s okay.”

“Yeah, sure. I’ll…I’ll see you in a few minutes.” He glances at her as she briskly walks out his bedroom door, flash of blonde disappearing quickly.

 _She’ll be right back_ , he reminded himself, walking down the hall to the – _amazingly_ – working bathroom. He rinsed his hands, hoping the cool water helped to cool the fire in his fingertips before she came back up.


End file.
